This is a review of the fourth group in the 2009 Quake Live TDM Nation Cup.

Today’s teams up for review are United Kingdom A, Estonia, Finland and Germany.

Earlier I already did a review of both group 1 with the Netherlands, Italy, Poland A and the Czech Republic, group 2 with Portugal, Spain, Lithuania and France and group 3 with Sweden, Belgium, Poland B and Hungary.

Today’s overview will be a rather one sided overview, focusing mainly on the UK. For this I apologize in advance ;). The other Nation captains were unfortunately unavailable for any questions.

The two teams who we should be keeping an eye on in group 4 are both [germany] Germany and the [uk] UK. These two teams are by far the biggest favorites to advance to the play offs in March.

United Kingdom

The UK captain Disrepute [interview] held some very extensive trials to find the right players to compete in the Quake Live Nations cup:

[uk] Disrepute: I was already the Quake 3 TDM captain from the last Nations Cup (and am again incidentally) so the role was pretty much given to me by default as I am active in Quake Live, plus nobody else actually wanted the job so there was no election as such. I have lots of experience in similar roles over the years so it is nothing new to me and my main focus was to try and open it up as much as I possibly could to the wider UK QL scene and give everybody the chance to trial.

We already had a number of UK players from the Q3 scene such as deus, ddk, rax that were already experienced and regarded as highly skilled so they were involved right away. However I felt it would be unfair to select players on the past alone, so rather hastily we set up a couple of trials for any player to enter and fight for their spot in the squad. Over 20 people turned out and deus and I selected 8 for the A squad. The actual talent on show and commitment to playing was impressive enough that we decided to form a B squad which would have the long term goal of giving those players we didn’t select (mostly based on lack of experience) the chance to train with the A squad, learning from our best and eventually work their way up to the A squad.

The eventual 8 that were selected were mostly experienced in other quakes which is inevitable given that it’s a limited beta, but some have no experience of national team play so we are also developing players in the A squad as well as the B.

It goes without saying Quake Live is very popular in the UK:

[uk] Disrepute: Our national scene in quake is probably a similar level to most nations. Not as active as say the Czechs with their LANs and community sites and such but there are enough active players so that you wouldn’t call it dead. Most of the Q3 scene has either quit or moved to QL though so really it’s all in this new title that we place our hope. A lot of old school Q3 players are returning for Quake Live so it looks like we could have a very active scene again, and I am doing my best to organise these national teams fairly and keep people playing and enjoying the game. We also have other ideas in mind to boost the UK scene.

The UK team played 2 matches in the group fase so far, winning both of them and losing no maps:

[uk] UK (W) vs [estonia] Estonia:

Map 1 (dm6): 147:81 (UK wins)

Map 2 (dm14): 117:56(UK wins)

[uk] UK (W) vs [finland] Finland:

Map 1 (dm7): 147:81 (UK wins)

Map 2 (dm14): 145:102 (UK wins)

Germany

The second team that’s expected to advance to the playoffs is [germany] Germany. The German team has a lot of experience playing Quake 3 Nation cups in the past and players such as xtro, hga and dk will make Germany a very hard nut to crack.

[uk] Disrepute: Our group should be simple enough to qualify from. Having already beaten Estonia and being heavy favourites to beat Finland (a team we already beat in practice) it is looking like a showdown for the group number 1 spot between us and the Germans. They like always in Quake are one of the stronger nations and it is too early to call that match, but expect us to put out our best team and hold nothing back.

So far Germany played only one match against [finland] Finland, beating them in two maps:

[germany] Germany (W) vs [finland] Finland:

Map 1 (dm14): 75:52 (Germany wins)

Map 2 (dm14): 151:82(Germany wins)

That’s all there is for the group 4 review. Thanks again to all the captains who send me their interview answers and again, my apologies for the one-sidedness of this overview! All the info and links about the 2009 Quake Live Nation cup event can be found on our Quake Live Nations Cup page, including all the other group reviews.